Serious Basement Work

February 21, 2016

Liz, using a 20 ton jack to prop up the house. Though we heard some slight creaks and pops, nothing extremely loud (something we were expecting).

We have Permaseal coming at the end of this week, and we’ve got some work to finish up before their arrival. As is the case with house stuff – before being able to complete a task, there’s something that has to happen first, and before that thing, there’s something else that has to happen, etc.

We need to get another coating on the bricks by the stairs and to also bust up the concrete by the South wall. But to access that area, we need to remove the stairs. Before we can do that, we needed to remove the support post. But before that… we needed to add our own support post.

There was a lot on the docket today, but a lot of it happened in pretty short order.

The stairs, before the demo.

The stairs – almost gone.

Right when we did this, I was in a panic. This was the specific scenario that I had worried about, but also forgotten about: no house keys.

With the stairs gone, and no ladder in the basement to get up to the first floor – we were effectively locked out of our house. We could have gone outside, but all of our exterior doors were locked.

Luckily for use, Bob had a set of keys – which we used to get in upstairs.

From here on out it’s going to be weird: for us to work in the basement, we’ll need to go outside and use the door.

We took a trip to Home Depot to rent a demo hammer for a few hours. Bob got this area knocked out for us (which took a while, since we did a serious pour).

The area by the stairs. I ended up tackling this while Liz worked on loosening up the sand in our pit (it had gotten a bit solid and crusted over, from all the cement work we’ve been doing).

The area, cleared of concrete. Bob had scored the area for us, and while the corner broke further in than planned… I was happy I was careful enough to keep the line clean to the chimney.

The pit, cleared up and looking more like a pit again.

We had a super productive day today – and just a few more evenings of work this week, and we should be in good shape for Friday.